Government

THE CENTRAL QUESTION facing Uganda after the National Resistance
Movement (NRM) led by Yoweri Kaguta Museveni came to power in January
1986 was whether or not this new government could break the cycle of
insecurity and decay that had afflicted the country since independence
in 1962. Each new government had made that goal more difficult to
achieve. Despite Ugandans' hopes for improvement after the war that
ended President Idi Amin Dada's rule in April 1979, national political
and economic difficulties worsened in the seven years that followed. A
new guerrilla war began in 1981. The National Resistance Army (NRA),
military wing of the NRM, seized Kampala and control of the national
government in January 1986. The NRM pledged it would establish
legitimate and effective political institutions within the next four
years. It failed to achieve this goal, however, partly because new civil
wars broke out in the north and the east, and in October 1989 the NRM
extended its interim rule until 1995.

Few of the basic political questions that confronted Uganda at
independence had been settled when the NRM seized power in 1986. Under
protectorate rule after 1894, Uganda's various regions had developed
along different paths and at different rates. As a result, at
independence the most politically divisive issue was the difference in
accumulated wealth among these regions. Political tensions centered
around the relatively wealthy region of Buganda, which also formed the
most cohesive political unit in Uganda, and its relationship to the rest
of the country. Adding to these tensions by the late 1960s, northern
military domination had been abruptly translated into political
domination. Moreover, some political leaders represented the interests
of Protestant church organizations in a country that had a Catholic
majority and a small but growing Islamic minority. Ugandan officials
increasingly harassed citizens, often for their own economic gain, while
imprisonment, torture, and violence, although universally deplored as a
means of settling political disputes, had become commonplace. All of
these factors contributed to political fragmentation.

The NRM government promised fundamental change to establish peace and
democracy, to rebuild the economy, and, above all, to end military
indiscipline. The new government's political manifesto, the Ten-Point
Program, written during the guerrilla war of the 1980s, traced Uganda's
problems to the fact that previous political leaders had relied on
ethnicity and religion in decision making at the expense of development
concerns. The Ten-Point Program argued that resolving these problems
required the creation of grass-roots democracy, a politically educated
army and police force, and greater national economic independence. It
also insisted that the success of Uganda's new political institutions
would depend on public servants who would forego self-enrichment at the
nation's expense. Political education would be provided to explain the
reasons for altering institutions and policies Uganda had used since
independence. The new institutions and policies which the NRM announced
it intended to put in their place involved drastic changes from the
practices of earlier regimes.

At the time that the NRA seized power, however, its organizational
life had been brief, its personnel were few, and its political base was
narrow. It had few resources to achieve its ambitious proposals for
reform. The NRA had been formed in 1981, but its political wing, the
NRM, had not been organized as a government until 1985. And because the
NRA had been confined primarily to Buganda and western Uganda when it
ousted the northern-based Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA), many
Ugandans believed it had simply substituted southern political control
for northern domination. Separate civil wars resumed in the north and
east only a few months later, and many people in those areas remained
deeply skeptical about NRM promises.

In addition, as soon as it came to power, the NRM implemented the
policy of broad-based government that Museveni had adopted during the
guerrilla war. He appointed leaders of rival political parties and
armies to high-level military and cabinet offices. These new leaders
generally did not share the NRM's approach to reforms, however.
Furthermore, as a government, the NRM had to rely on existing state
institutions, particularly government ministries, local administrative
offices, and the court system. Government procedures had enjoined public
servants working within these institutions from any political activity.
Many officials were neither sympathetic to the objectives of the NRM nor
convinced that political education for public servants was a legitimate
means to accomplish those goals. As a result, Museveni's government was
partly led and predominantly staffed by officials who preferred to
restore the policies pursued by the Ugandan government in the 1960s.
They shared power with a few NRM officials who were committed to radical
changes.

Nonetheless, NRM leaders made the most important policy decisions in
the regime's first four years, relying on the wave of popular support
that accompanied their rise to power and their control over the national
army. They introduced several new political bodies, including an inner
circle of NRM and NRA officials who had risen to leadership positions
during the guerrilla war, a hierarchy of popular assemblies known as
resistance councils (RCs), the NRM secretariat, and schools for
political education. But the NRM had too few trained cadres or detailed
plans to implement the Ten-Point Program during this period. As Museveni
himself conceded, the NRM came to power before it was ready to govern.

For these reasons--lack of a nationwide political base, creation of a
broad-based government, the absence of sufficient trained cadres of its
own, and the necessity of relying on existing government ministries--the
new government's leaders chose a path of compromise, blending ideas they
had developed during the guerrilla war with existing government
institutions on a pragmatic, ad-hoc, day-to-day basis. As a result,
during its first four years, the government maintained an uneasy and
ambiguous reliance on both old and new procedures and policies. And it
was often difficult to determine which official in the government, the
NRM, or the NRA possessed either formal or actual responsibility for a
particular policy decision.

New civil wars and ill-chosen economic policies diverted the
government's energies from many of its ambitious political and economic
reforms, but others were begun. In frequent public statements, Museveni
returned to the basic themes of the TenPoint Program, indicating that
they had not been abandoned.